Comrade Sergo! After speaking with Comrade Belensky on the subject of our conversation yesterday, please jot down a few words for me so that I know we have reached a complete understanding and that there will be no "misunderstandings."

My nerves are still bothering me, and the headaches are not going away. In order to try treatment seriously, rest must be made into actual rest.

With your busyness, you will probably not be able to carry out yourself what we discussed yesterday, and of course it would not be rational for you to undertake it. Find an efficient person attentive to details and entrust it to him (then it will be more pleasant for me to scold him rather than you, incidentally).

Around the 7th of May I will be expecting to receive from you both a detailed map and information about a suitable place (or suitable places) — elevation above sea level, isolation, and so forth and so on; also descriptions of these places and of those districts or provinces where they are located.

I must confess frankly that I have an extraordinarily great distrust of the "outlying regions"; from this distrust (and from my ailing nerves) I am frankly expecting that some "anecdote" will come out instead of any treatment. Even here near Moscow I have happened to see how after a heap of promises "anecdotes" would result, to correct which there was but one thing left: to leave the assigned place and return to Moscow and wait there for the "elimination of anecdotes." But from near Tiflis or from near Novorossiysk one cannot "return to Moscow." I fear, I confess, a distant journey: lest it result in exhaustion, rubbish, and fussing and squabbling instead of treatment of the nerves. Find a person attentive to details, and let him do it more carefully*.

Your Lenin

P. S. Do not forget to check the cipher with the Central Committee and with Stalin more carefully. Also the question of a secretary for deciphering and for small "written" assignments.

Written 7 April 1922

First published in 1945

in Lenin Collection XXXV

Printed from the manuscript